Sermon - Walls and Fences

Acts 8:26-40

Walls and Fences

James Sledge                                                                                     May 6, 2012

I wish I knew why I can remember lots of useless, trivial information, but so easily forget important things that I really need to remember.  I forget an important meeting and struggle to remember your names, but recall some stray episode from twenty or more years ago such as an ad I once saw for a fence company.  It was a full-page magazine ad, and it had a photograph of a quite substantial brick wall.  Right beside the wall, it said, “‘Good fences make good neighbors.’  - Robert Frost.”

I knew who Robert Frost was and had read a few of his poems in school.  I had heard of this one, but not actually read it, and so I took the fence company’s quote at face value, assuming that Robert Frost thought good fences to be a good idea.  Only later did I learn that the statement is a quote spoken within the poem, and it is a sentiment with which the poem wrestles.

The poem is entitled “Mending Wall,” and it describes two neighbors walking on either side of the stone wall that separates their properties, picking up and replacing the stones that have fallen down over the winter.  It is the narrator’s neighbor who speaks of good fences, but the poem is not so sure. 

The poem opens, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”  And after the neighbor makes his famous quote, the narrator wonders if he might challenge such thinking, wonders if might somehow plant this idea in his neighbor’s head.  "Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn't it where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.  Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.  Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down!"

You may have never noticed it, but there is a wall, a fence around the communion table. 

It is a little crumbled in places, a bit like the fence in the poem, but it is there nonetheless.  The fence says that the table is for the community of faith, and in our tradition that means for the baptized.  I’ve always had a certain unease with this fence, and so I tend to describe it somewhat vaguely.  When I invite people to the table for the Lord’s Supper, I frequently say, “All who are joined to Christ are welcome here,” and let people decide for themselves what that means.  “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

There is a wall or fence, perhaps a number of them, in our reading from Acts this morning. The Ethiopian eunuch is presumably a Gentile, and that puts him on the outside.  There were a number of people in New Testament times who were attracted to Judaism, but who did not make the full blown conversion which required circumcision.  (Not an issue for women, I suppose, but women’s status was generally tied to that of men in those days.)  As a Gentile this Ethiopian would literally have been fenced out at the Jerusalem Temple, allowed to enter the court of the Gentiles but not able to go any further.

And even had this eunuch wanted to convert fully to Judaism, he faced another problem.  He was a eunuch, and castrated males were excluded.  The law from Deuteronomy explicitly forbid him from entering.  But such barriers have not kept this man from a significant measure of devotion to God.  He has journeyed to Jerusalem, made a religious pilgrimage if you will.  And he has a scroll of Isaiah.  Scrolls were extremely expensive items, and while this eunuch is a man of some standing and wealth, this scroll is still a significant measure of his devotion. 

None of these issues would have much mattered to us except that Philip encounters the eunuch.  The story is well known to many.  Philip hears the eunuch reading aloud, typical practice in ancient times.  The Isaiah passage provides an opening, and Philip proclaims the good news about Jesus.  All this sets up the big moment.  The chariot comes upon some water and the eunuch says, “Look, here is water!  What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

I’ve sometimes wondered how his voice sounded when he asked this.  After all, he already knew the answer.  There was plenty to prevent it.  He was a Gentile.  That could perhaps be overcome, but he was also a eunuch, and it said right there in the Scriptures that he was unsuitable, unfit.  He was not on the divine guest list.  What was to prevent him?  Plenty.

I presume this is why Acts goes out of its way to tell us of God’s involvement in the story. Meeting the Ethiopian eunuch is no chance encounter for Philip.  He is directed to him.  An angel sends Philip down to this wilderness road, and the Spirit directs him to chase after the chariot.  God is directing the action here.  God is knocking down walls and fences that got built because the community of faith heard God tell them to do so.

This biblical story raises interesting questions of how we are to handle and appropriate Scripture.  Not only does it insist that understanding Scripture requires a guide, interpretive help, but also it violates boundaries that are established by Scripture.  What are we to do with a God whose love tears down the very fences that are built on God’s behalf?

Those of us who like to think of ourselves as “progressive Christians” are often proud to say that we are very much in tune with God’s fence razing love.  We relish the idea that we are also boundary crossing, barrier breaking agents.  But I sometimes wonder how much of this is God’s Spirit at work and how much is simply our personal preferences.  After all, we have built a few fences of our own.

If someone rushed up here right now, moved by an encounter with God in worship, and said, “Look, here is water!  What is to prevent me from being baptized?” many of us would be offended by this disruption of our worship.  There is a time and place for everything, and we have rules for this sort of thing.  Baptisms are on second Sunday’s of the month, and they need to be approved by the Session ahead of time. 

And we build plenty of other walls and fences.  We like to keep our religious activity neatly packaged in its proper place so that it doesn’t interfere too much with our regular lives.  We wall it off on Sunday morning.  We segregate it off in “the spiritual.”  We confine it within our liturgies and musical styles, within our ways of doing things.  It’s all very nice and neat… until the Spirit blows, until the Spirit reminds us that God’s love will not be constrained; neither by those walls we have worked to break down, nor by the ones we work to maintain.  “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

Look, here is water!  Here is bread and cup.  Here is grace poured out to give new life, grace to nourish and sustain us.  What is to prevent us from coming to eat and drink and to be drawn deeper into the love of God?  Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Thanks be to God!